As India prepares for renewed talks with Pakistan and with Maoist guerillas, an observer may wonder why the country’s track record in negotiations is so poor. Winston Churchill said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” but there is a make-believe quality to it in India,...

No, it’s just the Indian cult of the VIP The incident where Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan was detained by authorities at Newark’s airport (and the ensuing brouhaha) is one of those delicious events in which everyone involved comes out looking like idiots, a delight...

No, benign neglect led to less oppression anyway There is a tendency to use the West’s experiences as canonical and to measure Eastern experiences based on these. This is one of the biases that underlie so-called “Orientalism.” Thus, it is assumed that the status of...

No, the signals in this election do not compute The punters had given the BJP a fighting chance of winning these elections purely based on anti-incumbency and the pathetic performance of the UPA government. In particular, terrorism was rampant, culminating in the...

Yes, terror will be replaced with reconciliation The news and the images coming out of Sri Lanka as I write this are horrendous: 100,000 Tamil civilians trapped on a tiny beach, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are fighting, trapped and ignoring an...